Psychologists have found out what attracts people to each other

Reliability and willingness to help others combined with the physical attraction and enhance the effect of mutual sympathy, found researchers from the University of Worcester.

Psychologists have tried to understand how people choose each other for a long term relationship, what factors to consider this consciously and intuitively. Scientists have considered the evaluation of men and women to address potential partners and distributed them into categories — physical attractiveness and prosocial behavior (altruism, trustworthiness).

“We were interested to know whether vary these estimates depending on the desired duration of the relationship,” explained study author Daniel Farrelly.

The scientific work has attracted students from German universities who were shown 20-second clips with people of the opposite sex and were asked to rate their attractiveness from the point of view of two scenarios of possible relations short — term and long-term romantic. The study also used two games — the so-called dictator game and trust game. They helped to establish how the estimated number of participants in the experiment altruistic or trustworthy.

It turned out that expressed the presence of the above factors has attracted particular attention from potential partners who want a long term relationship.

However, frequently the altruism and reliability “worked” in combination with physical beauty.

Farrelly said that his team was able to find synergistic effects of physical attractiveness and prosocial behavior, and concluded that “we accept the decision that I want to be with a particular partner, not only the external data, but also on how they fit in with his “human” qualities.”